Author

Dr. Edward J. Parkinson teaches in the Department of English and Journalism at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois.

You may wish to visit his website - TurnOfTheScrew.com, a definitive Jamesian resource. It is a survey of literary theory and criticism of The Turn Of The Screw from the novella's publication to 1980.

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In my article "Immanence, Transcendence, and a
Gnostic View of the Fall of Man in Eden," I contrasted traditional
Christian and Gnostic views of sin. I there discussed "orthodox"
views at somewhat more length than liberal, Gnostic views. Here I
would like to discuss in more detail the Gnostic view of sin.

The three great religions of Semitic
origin—Judaism, traditional Christianity, and Islam—have
emphasized the transcendence and otherness of God, while faiths of
Indic origin, including Gnostic Christianity , have emphasized the
divine immanence. Neither view is incorrect, of course, since God
is both immanent and transcendent (a protestant theologian whose
name I cannot remember defined God as "the sum of all there is
plus infinitely more") , and all faiths have to some degree
recognized both realities.

The Sanskrit word karma, strictly speaking, means action, but in common parlance it has come to mean karmaphala, the fruits of action, those results, whether of reward or punishment, which follow our actions ineluctably "as the cart follows the ox" (Dhammapada). Upon first consideration karma would not seem necessarily connected to sin, since "good karma" rewards praiseworthy actions. The Buddha, after all, in the above-quoted Dhammapada, asserts that a man cannot escape experiencing the rewards of his good deeds even if he climbs the highest mountain or hides under the depths of the ocean--the reward of good is as ineludible as the punishment of evil.

According to Madam Blavatsky, the Universe, which she also calls Eternity, is "a boundless plane, periodically the playground of numberless Universes incessantly manifesting and disappearing" and involving " the absolute universality of that law of periodicity, of flux and reflux, ebb and flow, which physical science has observed and recorded in all departments of nature" (Algeo, "Secret Doctrine").

The four laws of spiritual growth (love, light, growth, and justice) are laws in two senses: (1) they are injunctions which we are commanded to obey and (2) they are, like the Law of Gravity or the Second Law of Thermodynamics, descriptions of constant, ineluctable processes in the universe. All four are closely interrelated.

Many clergy and laity in Gnostic Catholic denominations—what might loosely be called the "Leadbeater family" become very frustrated because of the low numbers in their congregations—even though they are offering something of incomparable value, it seems, their denominational offerings never seem to "catch on" as do denominations which ignore or even repudiate the esoteric truths of Gnosticism and, instead, offer only "mainstream" Christianity. As a result of this frustration, an unfortunate development often occurs.

There would seem to be a problem with being Gnostic
and Catholic, since the history of Catholicism is overwhelmingly
anti-Gnostic and since, even today, all mainline Catholic
churches—Roman Catholic, Old Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and
Anglican-- disavow the major tenets of Gnosticism and even many
churches which emanate from the modern apostolic work of C.W.
Leadbeater and James Ingall Wedgwood have either disavowed Gnostic
tenets or decided to refrain from proclaiming them publicly.

In the early centuries of Christianity those running the Church decided to remove certain esoteric ideas--prominent among them, reincarnation and karma--from the teachings exoterically presented to the many.